Amor Towles revisits a character from the wonderful Rules of Civility and also offers multiple New York-set tales. Towles's evocative stories drew me in, sometimes made me uncomfortable, and illuminated characters' true natures.
[It's] a funny aspect of life, thought Charlie, how a group of grown people can convince themselves to do something that none of them really want to do. They start by talking an idea into existence. Once the idea begins to take shape and dimension, they’ll talk away their hesitations, replacing them with all the supposed benefits, one by one. They’ll talk away their instincts and their second thoughts and their common sense too, until they are moving in lockstep together toward some shared intention that doesn’t appeal to any one of them.
In Table for Two: Fictions, Amor Towles offers six short stories set in New York City and a novella featuring a beloved Towles character that's set in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
In the novella Eve in Hollywood, Towles imagines the events following Rules of Civility, which ends with Evelyn Ross's departure from New York in 1938 and the train journey she extends to Los Angeles.
The six New York-set stories all take place around the year 2000, and they consider the impacts of chance encounters, the complications of modern marriages, and more.
Towles's writing is so lovely, I'm willing to follow his stories and his characters anywhere. This one took me a while to finish, but I savored each word.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
Amor Towles is also the author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, a book I really liked, and Rules of Civility, which I was even more taken with--the old NYC setting was so vivid, it felt like its own character.